Installing Windows 8.1 in Parallels 9 is akin to the method offered by VMware Player. It is by no means a machine suitable for virtualization, but it can get the job done when I really need Windows 8.1 software. The upside is that you would be getting real value for the money, as the software is thoughtfully designed to integrate well with OS X and not work just as a virtualization application.Īt this point I should point out that my MacBook Air is the 13-inch model, with the base processor (1.3 GHz Intel Core i5, Haswell generation) and 4 GB of RAM.
That is for a single license, but you can probably find it for less in places other than the official store. Parallels, which has reached version 9, costs €/$ 79.99 (depending on where you live). As some may know, Mac software is not cheap so this decision is apparently a no-brainer. Being free makes it the de-facto choice for those who want to run Windows on Macs, but without shelling out for additional software. Unlike Boot Camp, Parallels Is Not Cheap (Free)īoot Camp is offered by Apple as a built-in OS X feature, which means that it comes at the attractive price of zero. After my Boot Camp experiment, I decided to try Parallels, one of the best known virtualization software for Macs, to test how well Windows 8.1 can run next to OS X, in a virtual machine. No matter what is to blame, users wanting to run Windows 8.1 will find a way to do it, despite the shortcomings.
This is to be expected because Microsoft did not design its new operating system to run on Macs, but rather PCs, and the drivers provided by Apple are, also, far from perfect. My experience with Boot Camp has been far from ideal, as some features that I have grown to love in OS X, like the touchpad and the efficient power management, do not work as well under Windows 8.1. My first thought was to use Boot Camp, which allows to run Windows 8.1 natively on the MacBook Air, and other Macs. While my needs for using Windows software have decreased dramatically, I do still need a couple of applications every now and then, that either are not available for OS X or do not work as well as I would like them to on Apple's operating system. After getting the new 2013 Apple MacBook Air I looked into how I could get it to run Windows 8.1 seamlessly, as my aging HP laptop does.
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